> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.codyssey.tech/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 🪑 The Cobbler's Throne: Stick to the Shoes - URL: https://www.codyssey.tech/the-cobblers-throne/ - Published: 2026-09-23T08:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-23T08:00:00.000Z - Description: In the fourth century BC, a shoemaker told the greatest painter in Greece how to paint. From that moment, the word ultracrepidarian was born. A moral fable about Dunning-Kruger, the Peter Principle, and the question I keep avoiding: how often am I the shoemaker without knowing it? - Author: Robert Marcel Saveanu - Tags: Stories & Commentary, Tech Satire, #format-parable > *"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."* — Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871) --- ## ✉️ A Note from the Author There's a specific type of professional interaction that anyone with more than a decade in any technical field will recognise. Someone with no background in your discipline — but plenty of opinions about it — explains to you what you're doing wrong, how you should be doing it, and what would be good for your career. They do this with absolute confidence. They do this without irony. And they often do it from a position of authority that makes disagreeing feel like a career risk and agreeing feel like a small death. This goes back to the fourth century BC, to a painter and a shoemaker, and it has a name so obscure that most people have never heard it. The word is *ultracrepidarian*. The human pattern behind it is one of the oldest moral questions in professional life: what happens when confidence outpaces competence — and nobody in the room can tell the difference? --- ## 👟 The Shoemaker Who Couldn't Stop Talking There lived, in ancient Greece, a painter named Apelles. He was, by all accounts, absurdly talented — the kind of artist who made other artists quietly reconsider their life choices over a cup of wine. Apelles had a habit of displaying his finished paintings in public and then hiding behind them to eavesdrop on what passersby thought. Ancient Greek user testing, essentially. Minus the Jira tickets. One day, a shoemaker stopped in front of a painting and pointed out that Apelles had got the number of straps on a sandal wrong. Fair enough. The man made shoes for a living. He knew sandals like a DevOps engineer knows YAML files — intimately, painfully, and with a lingering resentment. Apelles, being a reasonable person, fixed the sandal overnight. The next morning, the shoemaker returned. Emboldened by his previous triumph in strap-counting, he began critiquing the legs. Then the composition. Then, presumably, the very concept of art itself. Apelles stepped out from behind the canvas and delivered a line that has echoed through twenty-four centuries of human frustration: *"Sutor, ne supra crepidam."* Shoemaker, stick to your shoes. From this moment, the word *ultracrepidarian* was born — a person who gives opinions and advice on matters far beyond their knowledge. It entered English through the essayist William Hazlitt in 1819, who was so annoyed by a literary critic that he forged an insult from Latin just to make it sting harder. Which is the most British thing that has ever happened. The shoemaker wasn't stupid. He was observant about sandals. His crime wasn't ignorance — it was the failure to recognise where his expertise ended and his confidence should have stopped. Here's the uncomfortable part: the shoemaker didn't think he was overstepping. He thought he was helping. And that's what makes this a moral question rather than just a personality flaw. --- ## 🏛️ The Three Laws of Misplaced Confidence What Apelles witnessed in a single shoemaker, modern psychology has spent the better part of a century studying in every domain where humans organise themselves into hierarchies. The research keeps arriving at the same conclusion from three different angles. ### 🧠 Law I: The Dunning-Kruger Effect (1999) In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger at Cornell University published a paper with the greatest academic title in history: "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognising One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." The core finding — though its precise mechanism has since been debated — was elegantly brutal: people who are bad at something lack the very skills needed to recognise they're bad at it. They tested participants on logic, grammar, and humour — which is a very specific kind of cruelty — and found that those scoring in the bottom 25% estimated their performance at the 62nd percentile. They didn't just think they were average. They thought they were *good*. Meanwhile, actual top performers consistently *underestimated* their abilities, assuming that if something was easy for them, it must be easy for everyone. So the people who should be confident aren't, and the people who shouldn't be confident are extremely so. Nature has a dark sense of humour. Researchers call this the "dual burden." The incompetent carry two loads: they can't do the thing, and they can't tell they can't do the thing. It's like trying to fix a bug in code you can't read — except the code is your own brain and the bug is your entire self-assessment module. Dunning has been careful to point out that *everyone* is vulnerable to this in domains where they lack skill. The physicist overestimating her understanding of economics. The developer overestimating his grasp of user experience. The CEO overestimating his knowledge of the product his company actually builds. The bias doesn't discriminate — it just waits for the gap between what you know and what you think you know. ### 🪜 Law II: The Peter Principle (1969) Thirty years before Dunning-Kruger, a Canadian educator named Laurence J. Peter noticed something tragicomic about hierarchies: people get promoted based on their performance in their *current* role, not their ability to do the *next* one. A brilliant engineer becomes a mediocre tech lead. That mediocre tech lead becomes a catastrophic engineering manager. The process repeats until every position is occupied by someone who has exactly reached the altitude at which they can no longer fly. Peter called this "rising to one's level of incompetence," and it was meant as satire. A 2019 study by economists at Yale, MIT, and the University of Minnesota confirmed the joke was real. They analysed 214 companies and over 53,000 employees. The result: the best salespeople made the worst managers. The correlation was negative — the better someone was at selling, the worse they were at leading a sales team. The companies knew this. They promoted the top salespeople anyway, because the alternative — telling a star performer they'd be a terrible manager — required a level of honesty that most HR departments have not yet evolved to produce. Peter catalogued several sub-species of this phenomenon. "Percussive sublimation" — being kicked upstairs to get someone out of the way. The "lateral arabesque" — moving someone sideways and handing them a longer title to disguise the fact that they've been professionally neutered. And then there's my personal favourite: "creative incompetence" — the rare, beautiful act of an employee deliberately sabotaging their own promotion chances because they've looked at management and decided they'd rather keep their soul. ### 📎 Law III: The Dilbert Principle (1995) If the Peter Principle assumes that people start competent and eventually promote their way into failure, the Dilbert Principle — articulated by Scott Adams in a 1995 Wall Street Journal article — offers a darker revision: what if they were never competent to begin with? Adams argued that companies promote their *least* effective employees into management specifically to stop them from damaging the actual work. Management, in this reading, is a containment zone. The real work gets done by the people below, while the people above generate mission statements, request status updates on status updates, and schedule meetings to discuss why there are too many meetings. Under the old Peter Principle, at least you got a boss who understood the work, even if they'd lost the ability to do it well. Under the Dilbert Principle, your boss never understood the work in the first place. They went straight from "can't code" to "manages coders." It's like going from not being able to swim to being appointed head lifeguard, except the pool is on fire and the lifeguard keeps suggesting everyone just think positive thoughts about water. --- ## 🪞 I Am Also the Shoemaker Here's where the story usually goes wrong. The temptation — and I've felt it plenty — is to read all of the above and think: "Yes, this explains the idiots around me." But that's the shoemaker's move. That's the exact moment where my confidence in assessing others exceeds my ability to assess myself. The uncomfortable truth Dunning-Kruger reveals is not that *some people* overestimate their competence. It's that *everyone does*, in the domains where they lack experience. I am not immune. You're not immune. The person reading this and nodding along thinking "finally, someone said it" is not immune either. I've done it. I've sat in meetings and offered opinions on topics I understood at a surface level, powered entirely by the momentum of having opinions about everything else. I've dismissed approaches I didn't fully understand because they didn't match my experience — as though my experience covered every possible angle. Every senior developer who has waved away a product manager's concerns without understanding the business constraint behind them has been the shoemaker. Every architect who has dismissed a QA engineer's testing strategy because "that's not how I'd do it" — while having never written a test plan — has been the shoemaker. The shoemaker in the original story wasn't a bad person. He was a skilled craftsman who got one thing right and let that single success convince him he was qualified to judge everything else. That's not evil. That's Tuesday. The moral problem isn't the overstepping — humans overstep, it's what I do, it's what you do. The moral problem is the refusal to pause. The missing half-second between "I have an opinion" and "I should say it" where a better question lives: *Do I actually know enough about this to be useful?* --- ## 🪑 The Throne A shoemaker heckling a painting in a public square is a comedy. The worst possible outcome is an awkward conversation and a corrected sandal. Give the same shoemaker a throne — a title, a budget, a reporting line — and the comedy ends. Nothing about him changed. Only the furniture did. That is the entire moral mechanism of authority: it doesn't make opinions better. It makes them *binding*. There's an unspoken social contract in professional life: competence is the currency and effort is the investment. You do good work, you get better at it, eventually someone recognises this and hands you more responsibility. It's not a perfect system, but most people accept it as fundamentally fair. What breaks this contract is not incompetence — nobody is great at everything, and that's fine. What breaks it is incompetence *seated*. The person who doesn't know, doesn't know they don't know, and has the power to make decisions based on that double ignorance. That's where the shoemaker stops being a comedy character and starts doing real damage. The system stops rewarding what you can do and starts rewarding how confidently you can occupy a chair you haven't earned. The throne takes many shapes. The executive dictating architecture to people who have actually read the codebase he hasn't. The steering committee redesigning a testing strategy that nobody at the table has ever executed. The hiring pipeline filtering candidates through keyword lists written by someone who Googled the role twenty minutes before the meeting — which is how senior engineers end up receiving junior offers that arrive with the regularity and personal warmth of a parking fine. I've [written elsewhere](https://www.codyssey.tech/tech-layoffs-and-the-talent-market-what-changed/) about what that machine does to the talent market; the short version is that the talent exists, and the system for recognising it doesn't. Research on workplace fairness consistently shows where this leads: the most capable people leave, the ones who stay disengage, and a small number eventually learn to play the game by its broken rules — they stop building and start performing. None of this requires a villain. It only requires a chain of decisions in which nobody has done the work being decided about — and nobody can tell that this is a problem, because that's how Dunning-Kruger works. --- ## 🎯 The Apelles Test There is, somewhere in this mess, a way forward. But it requires something that most people find deeply uncomfortable: admitting what you don't know. Dunning himself pointed out that the antidote to the Dunning-Kruger effect is *metacognition* — the ability to think about your own thinking. To ask yourself, before offering an opinion: do I actually know enough about this to have one? This is what Apelles was telling the shoemaker. Not "shut up." Not "you're stupid." Just: "Know the boundaries of your knowledge, and have the humility to stay within them." For anyone on the throne — anyone with authority over work they haven't done — this means accepting that managing people who do work you don't understand is a fundamentally different skill from doing that work. Hire for ability rather than familiarity. Promote based on evidence of future competence, not nostalgia for past performance in a different role. And when you're in a room full of people who expect you to have the answer, try saying "I don't know" — it's not weakness, it's professionalism. For the rest of us — the ones who read an article like this and immediately think of other people — the Apelles test points inward. Ask yourself: in this situation, am I the painter or the shoemaker? The honest answer, more often than I'd like to admit, is *both*. I'm a painter in my own domain and a shoemaker in someone else's. The quality that separates self-awareness from ultracrepidarianism isn't knowledge — it's the willingness to ask which one I am before I open my mouth. If you're the painter, keep painting. Your work has value whether the shoemaker can see it or not. And if, upon honest reflection, you discover you're the shoemaker? Stick to the shoes. They're harder to make than people think, and the world needs good ones. --- ## 🏺 Epilogue: The Day After There's a version of the story nobody tells, because Pliny didn't record it. The day after, Apelles — who had, after all, fixed the sandal — walks down to the shoemaker's stall and watches him work. Asks why the straps cross the way they do. Why the leather is cut against the grain. He listens. He learns something about feet that he later paints into a piece the critics call impossibly lifelike, and he never explains why. The difference between the two men was never talent, and it was never knowledge. It was that one of them knew which side of the counter he was standing on — and was willing, occasionally, to switch. Stick to your shoes. But visit other people's workshops with your mouth closed and your eyes open. That's the whole trick. Twenty-four centuries, and nobody has improved on it. --- *There is a wonderful irony in the fact that ultracrepidarianism — a word describing people who speak beyond their expertise — is itself so obscure that most people who use it are probably doing so for the first time. I am, in many ways, the shoemaker. The question is whether I have the grace to stop at the sandal.*